Guest author Derek Brown is a technology executive and analyst who blogs at One Blind Squirrel. Yesterday at the playground, Google threw a handful of sand in Apple’s eye. With a subtle, yet powerful update to its Gmail for iOS app, links to YouTube, Google Maps and Chrome now go directly to those relevant apps (if [...]

As cloud computing dominates more and more aspects of the tech world, similar-sounding but confusingly different something-as-a-service acronyms keep piling up. You’ve probably heard of SaaS (Software as a Service), since it applies mostly to cloud services delivered to end users.  But what about IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)? Even many tech [...]

If Google is making us stupid, Google Glass is destined to make us even stupider. While consistent with Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google Glass may actually be too much of a good thing. Way too much. Jay Yarow describes Glass as “a product plagued by [...]

A bill that would allow states to collect sales tax from Internet companies like Amazon and eBay passed the Senate on Monday by a wide margin of 69-27, in a largely bipartisan push to help level the playing field for brick and mortar stores vis-a-vis their online competitors. The Marketplace Fairness Act, sponsored by Democratic Senator [...]

The White House tapped Twitter legal director Nicole Wong as its first chief privacy officer, CNET reported. Wong, a Silicon Valley legal veteran, had only been at Twitter about six months; she was previously at Google for eight years. It’s not entirely clear what the White House chief privacy officer will do. Cabinet-level CPOs are generally [...]

On Tuesday, OpenStreetMap significantly lowered the barrier to creating fully share-able map data. With the launch of a new editor for the open source mapping platform, its freely available mapping data will be improved upon even faster, leading to more accurate and detailed mapping information in the many apps and services that reply on it. Starting [...]

Dear Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata,  I write to you not as a know-it-all tech analysis pontificator or even a hardcore gamer. I’m just a guy who spent his childhood Saturday afternoons hunting for 8-bit Warp Whistles and Tanooki Suits in Super Mario Bros 3 for Nintendo. And I have a simple idea.  As you know, [...]

After a nearly year-long wait, Google Glass #961 made it into my early-adopter open arms on Friday morning. I live in Portland, and while I could have flown down to the Bay Area for the full Glass indoctrination, I instead opted to go it alone and see what strange and serendipitous experiences might result for a [...]

Google Glass got the Saturday Night Live treatment this weekend in a Weekend Update sketch that poked fun at the absurdity of talking to a device on your face as a means of getting technology “out of the way.”  As tech correspondent Randall Meeks, SNL’s Fred Armisen takes jabs at everything from the difficulty of connecting [...]

Worried about your longevity as a worker in the fast-moving tech industry? What you need is some inspiration from John Sloan. Who’s John Sloan? He’s the man pictured in a photo I used in a recent post on 10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job. (See that photo below – or [...]

In a CNBC interview interview aired on Monday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates suggests that Windows 8 and Microsoft’s Surface tablet line could ultimately dethrone Apple’s iPad from its global tablet crown because iPad “users are frustrated.”  Yikes! I guess Gates has access to the really good stuff. Office Should Be Everywhere Last month, I took Microsoft CEO Steve [...]

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Countless students, artists and overall cheapskates who have long enjoyed using Adobe’s Creative Suite software without paying for it will soon have to pony up. Adobe is formally moving the latest versions of Photoshop and related design and production software to the cloud — specifically, to Adobe’s newly [...]